I visited the MFA with my sister today, originally expecting we would focus mostly on the photography and maybe some furniture exhibits. I was not at all prepared for the amazing Chihuly exhibit that opened last month.

I had heard about it briefly on the radio, and figured it would be “nice”. I was absolutely not exactly expecting it to be the highlight of the day. The scale, complexity and vibrancy of each piece was truly impressive.

I highly recommend taking a trip to see the exhibit to anyone. Here are some of my favorite photos.

I am currently in the middle of my second week at my new job as a Mechanical Engineer at bleck design group, and I am loving it so far. I’ve finally settled into my office a bit. Having a 27″ monitor is pretty nice, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be nicer to have a second monitor too.

I am picking up Solidworks rapidly. It’s a bit of a shift to shift my mind from working with SpaceClaim back to feature based modeling. And I do find myself using keyboard shortcuts that don’t exist (or do other things entirely), although I have replaced a number with SpaceClaim-esque controls.

It refreshing to know that I managed to retain a lot of what I have learned; whether from WPI, working at Jaco, or taking the FEs last year, that knowledge is apparently still rattling around in my skull.

Having finalized the design of my Imposing Speaker, it was time to begin building it. The finished product was to be made of brown foam and sprayed with flat gray automotive primer; this class was about exploring the form, so there was no need to use colors or other finishes.

Before I got started with the brown foam, I made a couple mock-ups out of blue foam, whiter is easier to work with quickly. I made some of these while I was still defining the final form (see the previous post), and then moved on to the top-heavy wave shape after that.

Cutting and Sculpting

With the shape and scale finalized, it was finally time to start with the brown foam. I started with a big chunk of foam and began cutting it down. Things were made much easier with some shiny new hand tools I had picked up; a pull saw, a coping saw, and my trusty Dremel.

I had worked with the brown foam before on the Material Interaction project. I knew that it would be fairly difficult to shape the speakers out of foam, so I ordered some auto speakers and cut them down to fit into my model. I removed the big magnet from the woofer, as it made the speaker too top-heavy. The good thing about doing this exercise and focusing only on the form is that I don’t have to worry about making it actually work.

After carving in a nook for the tweeter, I could set it into the foam. I left the entire tweeter intact, because the extra weight helped to stabilize the speaker.

Design Changes

As with any project, I was influenced by a number of constraints when building this speaker. The chief limitation I ran into was time; with a deadline looming, it was a struggle to find the time to work out all the fine details I wanted. As I came down to the end of the semester, I recognized that it was going to be exceedingly difficult to get the cylinders to protrude from the back of the form, as I had in my CAD models.

More coincidence than planned, it turned out that the woofer fit almost exactly into the plastic cover of a spindle of CDs I had lying around. This gave my a nice, smooth transition for the woofer to the speaker base. I then used the Dremel (with compass attachment) to create an annular seat for the tweeter.

Finishing

Before putting the speakers on, the base and speakers were all painted individually. The tweeter sat pretty snugly in the recess I carved for it, and the ring that it sat on was attached with standard wood glue. The woofer-CD case sub-assembly was also a pretty tight fit into the recess made for it. I spent a lot of time between chiseling and Dremeling as close to a cylindrical hole as possible. The CD case did not protrude out of the back, instead leaving me with a new feature of the partial recess in the back. I used wood filler to smooth out all the gaps where parts met, and to put smooth rounds on the inside of this recess.

Once the entire piece was assembled, all that was left was the finish. On the early coats, I also used a watered down mix of the wood filler to take up a lot of the pores that formed in the paint coats. I sprayed about twelve coats of flat gray automotive primer over the course of the two weeks I spent building the final model. This took a ton of paint, and a ton of sanding. The benefit of the automotive primer is that it is wet-sandable, so with enough coats, it really does allow for a great finish.

The Results

After hours of sanding and painting, getting down to a 1500 grain sandpaper polish, I finally had completed my speaker model. Take a look.

I was very pleased with the results. I achieved the top-heavy look I was aiming for, as well as the fairly exaggerated scale. The clean geometric form kept things focused, but the speakers also had the right level of detail. Overall, I think I accomplished my goal of designing an “Imposing” computer speaker.

Looking Forward

I am still toying with the idea of going the next step and building a working pair. This would obviously come with a host of other design challenges; I think the heavy woofer would pose a big problem with such a small base, but perhaps I could incorporate an acrylic foot for stability. I’d also have to brush up on my electrical knowledge.

At the moment, however, I am focusing my efforts on a new project, for a new class. I am taking a Furniture Design class, again at MassArt, and am finalizing my concept for a wine rack. I should begin building shortly. I will start posting about that project in the near future.

Now that I had an adjective, a noun, and a handful of rough hand sketches, it was time for me to start working through some concepts in 3D, so I started up SpaceClaim.

Still Sketching

In my hand sketches, I had found a few things that I really thought conveyed a sense of “imposing,” so these were my first targets. I tried exploring the idea of using the exposed speakers themselves as “lidless eyes” with limited success:

I then went back to the idea of something sweeping upward and outward, getting something like this:

At this point, I felt it was better to simplify, and distill the design down to fewer elements. This project was done for a “Design Form” class after all, so I figured I should make something more focused. So I broke the design down to one sweeping wave form carrying the two speaker elements:

Feeling that I was getting somewhere, I tried reinforcing the notion of top-heaviness by reversing the two speakers, this time placing the woofer on top of the tweeter:

I really liked where this was going now, and took some time to set up a mock-up environment. I built models of my computer and desk, and used these as references to set the scale of the speakers. I then sent the whole mock-up into my renderer to see what things looked like a bit more realistically than in SpaceClaim.

Design Refinement

At this point, it made sense to start building in some detail to my model. I knew I was going to have to make a physical model as well, so that placed some constraints upon how exaggerated the model could be.

I decided to start with the things that would be most difficult to make in real life, the speakers. Having some experience with the modeling foam we were using, I thought I would rather avoid having to make smooth and symmetric speaker cones. Instead of making them myself, I found some cheap car audio parts online; as an added perk, they provided 2D detailed drawings. It was easy to create these real-world speakers in my model. Again, the focus was on these speakers being very prominent and in your face.

It quickly became apparent that I needed to make the entire model larger; these speakers were a bit larger than the initial mock-up. I removed the grill feature on the top, and started fine tuning the design. I made all of the walls a bit bigger and sharper, giving me this:

Finishing Touches

I didn’t like how the speaker cones were jutting out from the base, so I extruded a cylinder straight back from both the woofer and tweeter. The tweeter now intersected the side walls of the “wave,” but I actually liked how that detail ended up looking.

After adding in a few rounds and some simple cabling off the back, I felt things were wrapping up nicely. However, seeing the speaker by itself doesn’t quite give a great idea of its scale, so it was time to head back to the desk mock-up:

Things looked good to me, so I made up few more renders:

At long last, the only thing left to do was build the model. I’ll cover the build next.

Once we had sufficiently fleshed out the form based only on our adjective, it was time to be given the noun, the actual object we would be designing. For this project, we would be making computer speakers. In my case, imposing computer speakers.

Research

As is often the case, I began by checking Google for images of “imposing speakers”. In fact, I scoured a number of image sites; DeviantArt, Flickr, and Core77 offered some interesting inspiration:

Most of these were relatively imposing, hitting on some of the traits I had identified in the adjective exploration. They are monolithic, top-heavy and solid, emphasizing a bulky scale. It was this sense of scale that I had found intrinsic to “imposing,” and I could see that it was not easy to convey through an object that sits on your desk.

Back to the Drawing Board

Now that I knew the “what,” it became a lot easy to start fleshing out some of the more abstract ideas that I worked on in the previous stage. This time, I started with hand drawings, drawing out thumbnail sketches of as many ideas as I could muster.

I was really liking the idea of a monolithic base that swept up and forward, going back to the idea of a huge wave bearing down on you. Early on, some of these sketches were exploring some more “organic” designs. Specifically I was looking at using the bare speaker as an icon for “eye.” I can think of few things more imposing than a huge, floating eye. But, somewhat because I was considering that I still had to build the thing, I started honing the design to simpler forms.

Once I had a good handle on what I wanted to pursue, I knew it would be faster to again move into SpaceClaim for some concept modeling, before I started building the speakers. I’ll cover that in the next post.

Once I had selected the adjective “imposing,” I had to start exploring the word with both 2D and 3D sketches. I went about this with three different techniques: hand sketches, CAD sketches, and physical paper and blue foam models.

Hand and CAD Sketches

One of the reasons I started taking ID classes was to improve my skill with hand drawing. Early on, though, I found it easier to focus on SpaceClaim models to flesh out the basic “feel” of Imposing. The advantage of the CAD model is its speed; I could very quickly move through a large number of forms, tweaking details effortlessly. I didn’t have to worry about my hand sketching technique, and I could just work right through a bunch of ideas. Here are a few example sketches.

Physical Models

Here you see one of the SpaceClaim models, created in paper. Blake wrote an add-in that unfolds the model into a flat pattern, that I printed out and put together to see what it looks like in real-life. It wasn’t the easiest to assemble, as I printed it to fit entirely on one sheet of 8.5″ x 11″, but it came out rather nice.

I had an assortment of blue foam mock-ups, many of which I did not take pictures of. Some were based off of the CAD models, so were completely independent explorations. I probably spent more time on the CAD models, but there is something very valuable about crafting the physical prototype and being able to turn it over in your hands.

I feel that you understand the shape to a much greater depth if you have constructed it. Working with foam is also largely a subtractive process, taking material away from the blank block you start with. Working in CAD can both add and subtract, which adds a lot of flexibility, but you still begin with an empty workspace and build up. It is surprisingly different to build via addition rather than by subtraction, and I think each can lead you to quite different results, even with the same goal.

At this point, we were finally given our noun. I’ll cover that next time.

The second project of my Industrial Design Form class was a bit more abstract than the first. We were asked to think about adjectives without an associated noun. That is, “fast” rather than “a fast car” or “fluffy” rather than “the fluffy bunny.” Specifically, we were trying to create a shape that conveys the adjective without any help from color, texture, or suggesting a physical object. This is surprisingly difficult to do. Only after exploring the form of the adjective itself would we be given the “noun” to apply the adjective to.

To begin with, I started by picking three adjectives to look at: sophisticated, dynamic and imposing. For each I created an image board, compiling images that characterized the adjective.

Sophisticated

For “sophisticated” I focused on two things, the elegance of nature in birds and flowers, and high-class items like violins and chandeliers.

Dynamic

“Dynamic” was all about motion. I included images of objects with high energy, like amusement park rides and fireworks, along with fluid motions. Waves are the definition of dynamic.

Imposing

To me, “imposing” relies heavily upon a concept of scale. Large things impose upon smaller things. Other than size, I found a sense of “vertical”-ness; tall and top-heavy objects seem to be imposing.

After creating the three image boards and defending my choice of imagery in class, I decided to run with Imposing. The next step was to proceed with hand sketches and sketch models of generic “imposing” forms, still without focus on an actual object. I cover that in the next post.

The first thing to do was select the materials. I began by looking at many different materials, finding images online, as well as taking my own photos, including water, metal, rubber, plastic, paper, felt, and even butter.

Once I began looking at butter, my mind started cruising through all sorts of foods, which may not be the first thing you think of when asked to pick a “material”. It is interesting, however, how many foods have such characteristic textures and behaviors. It wasn’t long before I settled upon taffy:

I especially liked how dynamic and energetic taffy seemed on the pull. It seemed like the perfect material to illustrate a wide range of interactions. From here, it was time to explore with some sketches, both 2D and 3D.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It is pretty mesmerizing to see the absolute chaos that comes from such a tiny little bullet.  I like the ballistics gel shots the best.